May 21st, 2020

Healing from Fibromyalgia

Most of the blogs I see about fibromyalgia are all about how you live with the disease. Yeah, that's not me. I'm the type to pick at the bandaid. To chafe to be free of it. A friend of mine had a husband who was prescribed the same pain medicine prescribed for me; one of the side effects was growing tumors, which kept me from taking it. I always seemed to have problems with side effects and was too scared to try it. He took it, and developed a tumor at the site of the injury he was taking the pain medication for. He died of that tumor after it metastasized to his brain. I couldn't take NSAIDs for pain relief either so I was in a lot of pain over the years, which made me highly motivated to solve the problem.

I noticed some interesting things about that pain because I was forced to live with it: 

• it was worse when I was stressed or upset
• it was worse if I was ignoring or avoiding my feelings
• it was worse if I ignored the chronic stress I was living under

These things gave me some encouragement that maybe I could figure out what the heck was going on under the hood.

What made the pain better?

• paying attention to my feelings
• doing a meditation or mindfulness practice to start observing my thoughts and feelings rather than just believing them as true (I don't mean to belittle thoughts and feelings at all but many of them are based on emotional and primitive brain trauma from the past and a resulting hypervigilance that has no current basis in reality)
• doing yoga three times per week while feeling into the body rather than mechanically exercising
• writing to heal
• learning acupressure for emotional release
• the acupressure allowed me to have an understanding of what emotion I was feeling and going after it so I could learn from it and release it and provide support for my self-healing efforts
• changing my living environment by speaking up and trying counseling. Ultimately my then-husband was not interested in relationship repair, so I moved on.

Check out my YouTube channel for videos on how to do some simplified acupressure for emotional release. The most helpful type for me was and still is PanHarmonic Healing (PHH.) If you find it helpful and want to learn more, I teach PHH. 

Believe in yourself. You have the ability to heal. The biggest thing you can do is be as kind to yourself every day as you can. We all have trauma; life can be hard. Your childhood trauma is active until you integrate it. You can do it, bit by bit. Self love and self kindness is key. 

With love,
​Elizabeth